Cities: To the Brink & Back

CITIES To the Brink & Back Sprawled along the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis funneled the emigration of half a nation toward the Western reaches of the U.S. Paragon of productive diversity, the city turns out candy and caskets, chemicals and containers, animal feed and jet aircraft. Its International Shoe Co. is the nation's biggest shoemaker, Budweiser the biggest brewer. It is the nation's second largest rail center. It served the first hot dog and the first ice-cream cone, was the site of the first balloon race. The corncob pipe was invented there. The first operation to remove a man's lung was performed there.

But more important for modern St. Louis are still two other facts of its past and present: seldom has a U.S. city come closer to the brink of civic disaster, and seldom has a city worked harder or more successfully to recover.

"Such a Dump." "After World War I," wrote Ernest Kirschten in his book Catfish and Crystal, "St. Louis dozed off. Maybe it was tired. Maybe Prohibition was not only a shock but also a sedative to this beer city. Depression was no stimulant. More than ever, St. Louis turned in on itself, contemplated its communal navel."

A wave of immigrants swept into the city while disgruntled middle-and high-income burghers fled into the surrounding county suburbs. Gracious mansions became tenements. By 1952, the city was one-quarter slum, another quarter near slum. No new office buildings had been put up in 25 years. Industry pulled out in wholesale lots. Property values and business activity plunged. "You might ask," wrote English Author Geoffrey Grigson in 1951, "why anyone would be proud of such a dump."

In 1952, business leaders, alarmed at the city's skid, formed a nonprofit organization called Civic Progress, Inc. It backed Engineer Raymond Roche Tucker, for mayor. Back in the late 1930s, Tucker had come up with a plan to eliminate the city's then notorious smog cover by cutting down the amount of volatile fuel used by industry. He later was named chairman of the department of mechanical engineering at St. Louis' Washington University. Democrat Tucker gave up his $20,000-a-year job for the $10,000-a-year mayor's post.

Recruits for Resurgence. Tucker recruited the city's business leaders to help work on problems ranging from slum clearance to the downtown traffic tangle. To fight blight while bringing the city budget back from the red, Tucker pushed through a $110 million public-improvements bond issue, lured in federal and private capital to help.

On the Fourth of July, nearly half a million people flocked to the St. Louis riverfront and, amid bursts of fireworks and patriotic oratory, celebrated the 200th anniversary of the year a group of French fur traders came ashore to found the city. But as much as anything, it really was a celebration of a "notable civic renaissance," as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has called it.